The energy consumed by information and communications technology (ICT) is of growing concern. High energy use has a negative environmental impact and can greatly increase operational expenses. Along with the rapid increase in data rates and energy use within ICT, there has been a corresponding increase in the number of available communication channels. For example, it is now typical for a user to have simultaneous access to the Internet via both Wi-Fi and Ethernet. Although Wi-Fi, which often consumes less power, is adequate for most communications tasks, it may be deemed too slow in other cases, for instance when a large file is to be downloaded. In such cases, high-speed Ethernet, which normally consumes greater power, may be considered necessary. Accordingly, selection of the channel with the lowest power consumption is not always the best choice and energy cost must be balanced with download time.
The competing desires of lower power consumption and acceptable data transfer rates motivate automatic channel selection to balance energy cost with response time. Although various solutions have been developed to select the local communication channel having the lowest energy consumption or the highest bandwidth, none have been developed that evaluate the communication path from end-to-end so as to take into account data transfer delays of the network or the data source. Accordingly, situations can arise in which high-speed Ethernet is selected over Wi-Fi, even when the data would be received just as quickly using the lower energy consuming Wi-Fi because of a non-local bottleneck.
In view of the above discussion, it can be appreciated that it would be desirable to have a system and method for automatically selecting a communication channel that consider not only local energy consumption and bandwidth but also data transfer rates from one end of the communication path to the other.